Commitment to Degree Zero: Barthes’ First Approaches to the Neutral

Abstract

This essay links Barthes’ late development on the Neutral in his 1978 Collège de France lecture course to his early reflections on the ‘white’ or ‘neutral’ writing by looking at lesser-known materials: articles published in the sanatorial student journal Existences (1942–4), and in the newspaper Combat (1947–51), as well as how these pieces were integrated into his first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953). I show that Barthes’ first approaches to the ‘neutral’, under the spell of Sartre’s theory of committed literature, both ‘consents’ to the idea of the political responsibility of literature and rejects it, creating a third, crosswise notion of writing that prefigures the recalcitrant force of the Neutral. By exploring the complexities of these early pieces, I argue that some of the unsolved issues will reappear in the Collège de France lecture course, notably the figure of ‘aporia’, and I discuss the ethical implications of this ‘impossibility’.

Keywords

Barthes Camus Degree Zero engagement of form ethics Neutral Sartre

In the course description of The Neutral, his second-year public lecture series at the Collège de France, Barthes defines the concept as ‘every inflection that, dodging or baffling the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning, aims at the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse’ (2005: 211; 2002a: 261¹). An amorphous notion without predicates, manifested more through its intensities than its logic equilibriums, the Neutral can be best understood as a structural destabilization, or a ‘passage’ (traversée) as it comes across language, discourse, body, gesture and action. Borrowed from structural linguistics and referring originally to a ‘tertium’, a third term of zero that cancels out the morphological or phonological opposition,² the term Neutral acquires a crucial ethical dimension in Barthes’ Collège de France lectures. It is a refusal to choose between, or to enter into, the sets of binary oppositions that society fabricates routinely and obliges its subjects to accept. A ‘neutral’ subject would thus opt for silence, retreat, oscillation and wou-wei (non-action), as opposed to a ‘committed’ one who would always defend a position or transmit a message. During the four-month lectures on the Neutral, from 18 February to 3 June 1978, the expression ‘degree zero’ resurfaces a number of times, until one day Barthes acknowledges that one of the original ideas of the course was a ‘remake of Writing Degree Zero’ (2005: 176; 2002a: 222).

It is my intention in this essay to revisit the notion of ‘degree zero’ and to consider it the first avatar of the Neutral. By avatar I mean the Neutral, as a strong concept, does not acquire a proper definition, or, to use Barthes’ preferred word, a ‘description’, until his second-year Collège de France lectures. Yet the impulses of the Neutral have lived a long life, from the écriture blanche (white writing³) of Camus, to the gestus in the theatre of Brecht, from the satori in Zen Buddhism, to the ‘exemption de sens’ (exemption of/from meaning) initiated by Barthes’ contact with Japanese culture. My point is that in the early foundational notion of ‘the degree zero of writing’ (le degré zéro de l’écriture), which Barthes uses interchangeably with l’écriture blanche, or l’écriture neutre, a set of reflections that will become central to the late concept of the Neutral already germinates, such as a utopian disarming of signification, or an ‘oscillation of value’ (Barthes, 1977: 139; 2002b, IV: 713). More importantly, the ethical position latent in the ‘degree zero of writing’ will assert itself more forcefully, in the ‘Inaugural Lecture’ at the Collège de France, as ‘literature’s third force’ to ‘institute, at the very heart of servile language, a veritable heteronomy of things’ (Barthes, 1979: 10; 2002b, V: 438).

Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero), Barthes’ first book, published by Seuil in the early spring of 1953, is widely received as a defense of l’écriture blanche, a neutral, innocent, ‘amodal’ writing that escapes symbolism, manifested first in the works of Camus, Cayrol, Blanchot, and then, a little later, in those of Robbe-Grillet. The ten short essays that compose the final two-part volume come from the rewriting, reordering and expansion of a series of articles that Barthes had previously published in Combat,⁴ first in 1947, then from 1950 to 1951.⁵ The writing of the book, we know, is on the one hand strongly marked by formalist influences (notably the works of Viggo Brøndal, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, and Ferdinand de Saussure⁶), and on the other hand by the Sartrean imperative of social and political commitment. At the Liberation, Barthes claimed himself ‘a Sartrean and a Marxist’: ‘I tried to “engage” literary form (of which I had a deep sense from Camus’s L’Étranger) and to Marxicize Sartrean engagement’ (1998: 252; 2002b, III: 1026). A third, more oblique and subtle ‘conversation’ with Blanchot, on literature’s ‘essential solitude’ and its negative and erratic relation to history, is perhaps less emphasized compared to the first two influences. But recent criticism has strengthened this association, making the implicit parallel and difference between Barthes and Blanchot more tangible and specific.⁷

My goal in what follows is not so much to provide an exhaustive contextualization of Writing Degree Zero, nor to reinstate what Patrizia Lombardo has perspicaciously termed, in her book, Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes, the ‘first paradox’ of ‘History and Form’ (1989: 1–44). Rather, I will delve into the prehistory of Writing Degree Zero to show how Barthes ‘consents’ to the idea of the political responsibility of literature while reacting strongly to it, creating a third, crosswise notion of writing (‘degree zero’) that prefigures the recalcitrant force of the Neutral. In particular, I will examine the transitional postwar period (1944–53) in order to trace a ‘turn’ in Barthes’ thought process that moves away from an earlier, ‘innocent’ and ‘classic’ approach to the neutral, toward a more ‘ideologically-influenced’, historical one. Sartre and Camus, more than Blanchot, formed a contrasting pair and played a crucial role in this transition.⁸ If Camus’s white writing in L’Étranger (The Stranger) was closer to Barthes’ heart-felt desires, Sartre’s impressive discourse on committed literature nonetheless changed the course of the development. Barthes dreamed of being ‘contemporary’ to his time; he oscillated between a belief in literature’s revolutionary potential and a skepticism toward the real power of individual writers, between an eagerness to recognize the ‘vast novelty of the present world’ (Barthes, 2012: 86; 2002b, I: 223) and an aversion toward the hyperbolic political assertions. Writing Degree Zero translated some of these tensions but masked others. Barthes’ original questioning on the fragility of ‘degree zero’, or Camus’s ‘style of absence’, however, will reappear obstinately, like the return of the repressed, in the lecture course on the Neutral, notably through the theme of ‘aporia’, or the ‘impossible’.

The ‘Neutral’ Style of Camus

In his excellent analysis of Writing Degree Zero, Philippe Roger points out that despite its praise for a clean and non-hysteric style, Barthes’ first book is written in a ‘curious cluster of heterogeneous languages’ (1986: 302). From the thin volume composed of mixed topics such as ‘L’artisanat du style’ and ‘Écriture et révolution’, readers are likely to remember the following key passage on ‘white writing’:

In this same attempt toward disengaging literary language, here is another solution: to create a white writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language. A comparison borrowed from linguistics will perhaps give a fairly accurate idea of this new phenomenon; we know that some linguists establish between the two terms of a polar opposition (such as singular-plural, preterite-present) the existence of a third term, called a neutral term or zero element: thus between the subjective and the imperative modes, the indicative is according to them an amodal form. Proportionately speaking, writing at the zero degree is basically in the indicative mood, or if you like amodal; it would be accurate to say that it is a journalist’s writing, if it were not precisely the case that journalism develops, in general, optative or imperative (that is, emotive) forms. The new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of all those ejaculations and judgments, without becoming involved in any of them; it consists precisely in their absence. But this absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no secret; one cannot therefore say that it is an impassive mode of writing; rather, that it is innocent. The aim here is to go beyond Literature by entrusting oneself to a kind of basic language, equally far from living languages and from literary language proper. This transparent form of speech, initiated by Camus’s Stranger, achieves a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style; writing is then reduced to a sort of negative mood in which the social or mythical characters of a language are abolished in favour of a neutral and inert state of form; thus thought remains wholly responsible, without being overlaid by a secondary commitment of form to a History not its own. (2012: 76–7; 2002b, I: 217–18, translation modified)

If this long passage reads indeed a little ‘heterogeneous’, it is because it cuts and pastes together two separate paragraphs: one, on ‘neutral writing’, originally appeared in Barthes’ first article in Combat, ‘Le degré zéro de l’écriture’, and the other one, on ‘white writing’, was published several years later in ‘L’écriture et le silence’. While the ‘neutral writing’, in its original version, points to a constellation of four names – Camus, Sartre, Queneau and Prévert – ‘white writing’ refers exclusively to Camus’s style in The Stranger. In the final book version of Writing Degree Zero, Barthes postulates the ‘neutral writing’ as a more general phenomenon of the postwar literature and makes Camus the central case of both the ‘neutral’ and ‘white’ writing, whose ‘style of absence’ coincides perfectly with an ‘absence of style’.

In spite of this synthesizing effort, Barthes’ argument in the above citation reveals a series of contradictions. First, the ideal ‘indicative’ or ‘amodal’ style is both ‘journalistic’ and antithetic to the ‘ejaculations and judgments’ in journalism. Second, writing should rid itself of ‘social and mythical’ characters of language and yet remain totally ‘committed’. Third, ‘style of absence’ and ‘absence of style’ constitute a clever word play, but the two terms point in opposite directions. Whereas ‘style of absence’ may indeed refer to Camus’s idiosyncratic style in The Stranger, ‘absence of style’ resonates with Sartre’s call for dissolution of aesthetic purism in the first chapter of What Is Literature?. Finally, in the passage immediately following the quote, Barthes also makes Camus both a latecomer in the lineage of modern experimental writing that has engaged in an ‘opacity of form’ (Mallarmé, Flaubert, Proust, etc.) and a fresh new voice that has readopted classical values, for his ‘neutral writing in fact rediscovers the primary condition of classical art: instrumentality’ (2012: 77–8; 2002b, I: 218).

What is exactly the neutral style of Camus? There is in fact a ‘neutral’ before the Combat articles, another one that Barthes discovers with Sartre’s theory of committed literature around 1945–6. Barthes’ final development on l’écriture neutre in Writing Degree Zero marks a third step, incorporating Sartre’s militant ideas while reacting strongly against them. It is the difficult break-up with the first neutral, attached to the values of classicism, the hesitant and semi-voluntary turn toward the second, which pleas for the renunciation of style and rhetoric, and the dialectic move in the third step, which aims to go beyond Sartre, that constitute the ‘heterogeneous languages’ in Writing Degree Zero, making its style not only ‘rhapsodic’, but almost ‘tense and nervous’ (Roger, 1986: 302).

The ‘Neutral’ in Classicism

Barthes’ first approach to the ‘neutral’ has more to do with the allusive value of language that he sees as characteristic of the French classical prose than a negative indicator that aims at toning down the ‘ejaculations and judgments’ of ideological discourses. Tiphaine Samoyault observes that the adjective ‘classical’ constitutes the most powerful leitmotif in Barthes’ sanatorium writings from 1942 to 1946 (2015: 198).⁹ Reflections on ‘classicism’ conclude an important article on Gide, ‘Notes sur André Gide et son “journal”’ (1942), become the central subject in ‘Plaisir aux classiques’ (1944) and occupy an important place in Barthes’ first article on Camus, ‘Réflexion sur le style de “L’Étranger”’ (1944), in which the word ‘neutral’ appears for the first time. Barthes associates the French classical style with two tendencies: on the one hand, it incarnates obscurity and ambiguity, due to a propensity of not saying much, or at least of not saying all, so the reader is left to think on his own; on the other hand, it involves short-cut, fragmentation, silence and a ‘lesson of decency’ (2002b, I: 58). Like most literary historians, Barthes agrees on the ‘clarity’ of the classical language, but he insists that ‘being clear’ does not equal ‘being full’ (2002b, I: 59). The ambiguity of the classic style comes from the deferral of the signification: all signifiers are present, but their absolute meaning is absent.

Barthes’ first reading of The Stranger glides along the principle of pleasure. Far from associating Camus with a voiceless hero who writes in an ‘inert’ form, Barthes considers him an heir of the classic prose, whose indifferent style has reached, in a bizarre manner, harmony with the theme of absurdity. His description of Camus’s style suggests that the ‘neutral’ is an extension of classicism, not its subversion:

In particular, the style of The Stranger has a marine quality: it is a kind of neutral substance, but a little vertiginous because of its monotony, sometimes fulgurations come through, but mostly it is subject to the underwater presence of motionless sands that carry on this style and color it. Wrapped in the white light of The Myth of Sisyphus, these sands appear to be in the shape of hard crystals. The style of The Stranger is thus a remarkable example of the bizarre background effects on the form. (2002b, I: 75, own translation)

We should recall the fact that the writings of Barthes up until this point have been largely ‘innocent’, in the sense Blanchot defines it in his article ‘La parole “sacrée” de Hölderlin’ (‘The “Sacred” Word of Hölderlin’). Innocence, for Blanchot, is inseparable from Empedocles’ conception of Nature, that ‘boundless totality’ that is simply there. The task of poetry consists of confronting this paradox of acknowledging the necessity of the ‘unexpressed’ (inexprimé) in nature and the responsibility of making it present through words (Blanchot, 1949: 119, 130). We know that in the sanatoriums, Barthes writes about classical tragedies, islands, statues and flowers of Greece, the light and colors of water, and obtains a knowledge of history by reading all the works of Jules Michelet, the Romantic French historian. His own relation to the world is that of a stranger, of a marginal figure left out of the march of History. The world, apart from Nature and classical literature, lacks content. It is for all these reasons that Camus, who also suffered from tuberculosis and whose entry into the world resembles Barthes’ own in many ways, becomes naturally the ‘first bridge’ between a culture inherited from classic Belles-Lettres and new political ideas (Marxist and Trotskyist) tossed around in the secluded world of the sanatorium (Roger, 1986: 325–6). For Barthes, the pleasure of reading The Stranger comes from a double feeling of movement and stagnation, of transparence and depth. On the one hand, Camus’s straightforward and simple manner of telling things makes the novel ‘flow’ like marine water; on the other hand, the feeling of ‘motionless sands’ makes the form ‘opaque’, preventing any meaning from showing through. In the ‘indifferent’ style of The Stranger, Barthes sees something dead and something alive, something that recalls the inhuman geological strata and a potential force that breaks it.

‘Sartre’s Endeavor’

Barthes has long admitted the irreplaceable role Sartre played in the development of his intellectual life, especially in its early stage, immediately after the Liberation. In an interview with Normand Biron aired on Radio Canada in 1975, he reveals that one of the most important lessons that Sartre brought to him was to ‘demystify literature in its institutional, reactionary and sacred aspect’ (2002b, V: 418–19). In his ‘Introduction’ to the first issue of Les Temps modernes as well as in the first chapter of What Is Literature?, Sartre famously denounces the poets’ ‘irresponsibility’ vis-à-vis the society and calls for a break with classical writers’ ‘bourgeois origin’. Bourgeois writers, Sartre argues, are like ‘peas in a can’ – they bind with each other by ‘an analytic cast of mind’: they describe each other’s dreams, fears and anxieties in order to attain a better self-analysis (the epitome of this spirit being Proust). The ‘writers of the present’ should therefore abandon all flowers of rhetoric in favor of a simple and comprehensible message that chants the freedom of humanity. In this light, language becomes primarily a vessel of signs and a medium through which ideas and thoughts are conveyed – literature should break its affinity with the privileged group and extend itself to all classes. ‘Writers of the present’ are consequently encouraged to limit the ‘involuntary expression of their souls’ and concentrate on the message they communicate: they can ‘reason, assert, deny, refute, and prove, but the cause they are defending must be only the apparent aim of their discourse, the deep goal is to yield themselves without seeming to do so (se livrer sans en avoir l’air)’ (Sartre, 1988: 44–5; 1948: 37). The preferred language of ‘modern times’ and of ‘committed literature’ is not poetry but prose, which, ‘indicative’ and journalistic, records ideas, events and actions of the everyday life.

Barthes was certainly under the spell of Sartre’s holistic and collective vision of humanity. In a letter to his beloved friend Robert David, dated 20 December 1945, he writes: ‘I am going through several harsh days, Sartre’s manifesto [‘Introduction’ to Les Temps modernes], which taught me nothing new but his accurate words named the thing. Rereading my little papers in Existences, so outdated, so bad, reading the latest novel of Sartre [The Reprieve] (finished in a day), all this throws me into violent thoughts about my life and my personality’ (2015: 81, own translation). Barthes thus found his articles on classicism, including the one on Camus, unacceptable. Before, he tried to ‘savour in life the rhyme of purifications and of sensuous pleasure, of asceticism and of feast’; now, it is time to ‘turn to men’ (2015: 85, own translation). In his second article published in Combat, robustly called ‘Faut-il tuer la grammaire?’,¹⁰ Barthes shows eagerly his newly acquired historical consciousness of the present world. For the first time, he distances himself from the good usage of grammar and rhetoric, historicizes the notion of clarity, and sees in the perfect style of classicism an instrumentalization of the powerful social groups.

Yet there is something in Sartre’s emphatic stance that holds Barthes back. In the original version of ‘Le degré zéro de l’écriture’, it is Sartre’s name, before those of Queneau and Prévert, which co-appears with Camus under a separate heading called ‘La tentative de Sartre’ (‘Sartre’s endeavor’). To one’s surprise, Barthes claims that Sartre has also, in his endeavor to commit his work, created a ‘neutral’ and ‘innocent’ style, in the sense that everything on his mind is transmitted, without concealed thought or mannerisms. His style in his essays is so clear and seductive; it captivates the readers and persuades effortlessly. At the same time, by creating such a ‘gratuitous’ and ‘brutal’ writing, Sartre has eliminated once and for all the ‘allusive process’ central to old school rhetoric. ‘This absence of secret’, Barthes concludes, is ‘a very new element of writing’ (1947: 2). So far Sartre has been able to keep the tempo and spirit on the go, but his ‘victory is uncertain’, itself being ‘limited by the historical conditions of the current literature’ (1947: 2).

Writing Degree Zero: ‘The ‘Engagement of Form’

As many critics have noted, Writing Degree Zero is a direct response to Sartre’s What Is Literature?¹¹ The first chapter, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’écriture?’, takes almost the exact title from the first chapter of Sartre’s book, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’écrire?’ Rewriting his articles from Combat, Barthes attempts to offer an alternative history, not of literature as a socially privileged mode of transaction, but of what he calls ‘literary forms’: the multiform literary productions from the 17th century to 1947, forming their bodies and hidden depths, transforming into a riddle-like ‘object’ for each writer of his epoch to scrutinize and ponder (2012: 4; 2002b, I: 172). This ‘objectified Form’ (Forme-Objet), far from antithetic to History, cuts through it and evolves with it, and it is this diachronic relation that is the true subject of Writing Degree Zero.

Like Viggo Brøndal, Barthes believes that language, as a basic system that founds speech and thought, predisposes individual choices. Our vision of the world, and our way of living this vision, is inevitably inclined by the language we use (Brøndal, 1943: 54). It is in this sense that we should consider Barthes’ reflections on politics and ethics inseparable from the question of language. For him, choice of form implies simultaneously an ethical commitment. ‘Writing’, he describes in ‘Qu’est-ce que l’écriture?’, is ‘essentially the morality of form, the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of this language’ (2012: 15; 2002b, I: 180). Form is not only a writer’s aesthetic preferences and mannerisms, or what Barthes calls the style, that inexplicable, organic, secretive part of élan the writer inherits from his personal history; it is also a general choice of tone, of ethos, of his self-positioning in history and the function he assigns to writing.

The ‘engagement of Form’ will be more concretely realized through the act of writing. In Writing Degree Zero, writing is already postulated as a third term, coming after language and style, two ‘blind forces’ that await unification (2012: 14; 2002b, I: 179). While language is a ‘horizontal’ social institution that limits our choice and confines our freedom, style is the vertical and solitary dimension of thought that not only points toward the future but also toward the past. Barthes’ lexicon when presenting this opposite pair is largely Sartrean, and yet, it is precisely by introducing writing as a third term that Barthes outplays the Sartrean dialectics of form and content, of phenomenon (language) and essence (idea). ‘By providing three terms’, writes Jean-Michel Rabaté humorously,

Barthes moves out of this conceptual vice. Écriture will be emancipated from a forced dilemma in which one had to choose between a private discourse, often the production of a small coterie who will be necessarily obscure and apolitical (one can think of Mallarmé, clearly not a model for Sartre then), and socially responsible positions leading to the role of the committed intellectual on the lookout for generous causes and critical denunciations. (2002: 76)

Despite the outplaying of the binary opposition, writing remains ambiguous. If Sartre has postulated writing as an exercise of freedom, Barthes believes that there is something fundamentally imposturous in this over-confident assertion. For one thing, true writing is almost always born out of a conflict between individual and society, but when a writer fails to change the world, he is sent back to his basic instrument – language. Society, however, does not provide a language fresh enough for the writer to start a new struggle, or even to invent a new form. The writer has thus no choice but to return to his solitary corner, resuming his Orphic apprehension. He can ‘conceive’ literature, but is not capable of ‘extending its limits’ (2012: 15; 2002b, I: 180). The Sartrean definition of writing as communication and collective response is itself a myth.

From the Impasse of the Degree Zero to the Aporia of the Neutral

In his course on the Neutral, Barthes acknowledges that one phenomenon has struck him as early as Writing Degree Zero and has obsessed him ever since: ‘what is produced against signs, outside the field of signs, is very quickly recuperated as a sign’ (2005: 26; 2002a: 54). Silence, for example, originally a weapon against dogmatism, is soon interpreted as a sign of wisdom, heroism, enigma, passivity, etc. One may ask if this ‘obsession’ was not originally a reaction against Sartre, because not only had Sartre theorized extensively the theme of silence in What Is Literature?, as well as in other essays such as ‘The Republic of Silence’,¹² but also, more pertinent to our topic, his ‘absence of style’ and emphatic style managed to destroy Camus’s ‘style of absence’. We know Sartre published an essay on Camus called ‘L’Explication de L’Étranger’ (‘Explanation of The Stranger’) in 1943. Barthes surely had read it in the sanatorium and, as Louis-Jean Calvet suggests, he may even have borrowed many themes from it while writing his own ‘Réflexion sur le style de “L’Étranger”’ (1990: 107–8). One of the most remarkable turns happening in Sartre’s essay is that while emphasizing that The Stranger is ‘not an explanatory book’, that it is not a ‘novel with a message’ (roman à thèse) (Sartre, 2001: 6–7; 1947: 97), the philosopher continuously uses The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s philosophical treatise on absurdity, to explain the novel, to provide a ‘theory of the absurd novel’ that he deems missing in The Stranger. Sartre also sharply points out that Camus’s style is characterized by a ‘neither-nor’,¹³ by a discourse that does not belong to the human world, and that this style should therefore only be measured by ‘a silent intuition’ (2001: 16; 1947: 111). But strangely, by constantly explaining the meaning of ‘neither-nor’ (i.e. ‘absurdity’, ‘revolt’, ‘the uneasiness vis-à-vis man’s inhumanity’), Sartre deprives Camus’s writing of its original ‘innocence’. If Camus did not mean to ‘prove’ anything, Sartre did. If Camus ends his novel on a note of ‘magnificent sterility’ (Sartre, 2001, 7; modified translation), Sartre manages to teach a philosophical lesson.

If the ‘analytic cast of mind’ of the bourgeois writer is shortsighted and pathetic, is the explanatory mode of the master-philosopher any better? Is it not prone to rigged positions of mainstream discourses and ideologies? In Writing Degree Zero, eager to postulate the ‘neutral writing’ as an emerging postwar phenomenon and to affirm an alternative way of commitment through ‘Form’, Barthes leaves these initial questions unanswered. The following passage on Camus from the original ‘Degré zéro de l’écriture’, removed from the book version, raises questions that Barthes will address years later, in his Collège de France lectures, as the paradox or the aporia of the Neutral:

Unfortunately the invention of an absence of style is assimilable to the paradox of a tightrope walker who produces pure pause between two oscillations: it cannot develop over time; because the exercise of language (and objectively speaking literature is nothing but a language) inevitably produces automatic expressions, constants, themes, within which there is no more innocence, as they mark the return of the myth, that is to say of literature. As soon as the writer becomes really himself, that is to say when he makes use of the peculiarity of his talent (which for him is the very form of perfection), literature reconquers him: he is no longer in a position to surmount it. Even if he tries to repress any emphatic tendency, that very effort will inevitably produce a new type of preciosity, that of concision. Can a writer like Camus escape the Flaubertisation of writing? That is the tragic extent of the dilemma. (1947: 2, own translation)

How long can Camus’s innocent style last? Here, the question translates less into the danger of literature becoming myth than Camus’s own capacity to hold on to an implicit style. In ‘totalizing’ societies, Barthes will suggest in The Neutral, the implicit is considered a ‘crime’, for it ‘escapes power’, it is the degree zero (2005: 24; 2002a: 52). Sartre’s ‘explanation’ aside, Camus’s own development as a novelist quickly failed Barthes’ expectations. His next novel, La Peste (The Plague), earned a severe criticism from his one-time apologist.¹⁴ Their subsequent break-up¹⁵ seems to attest in a perfect way that ‘nothing is more fickle (infidèle) than a white writing’ (Barthes, 2012: 78; 2002b, I: 218).

Tiphaine Samoyault rightly points out that there is always something ‘tragic’ about the ‘writing at zero degree’ because it opens onto an ‘impasse’ (2015: 259). If Barthes curbed his doubts on the tenability of Camus’s ‘innocence’ while reworking on the Combat articles, we can hardly say he concealed his overall pessimism on the future of ‘white writing’. In 1953, Writing Degree Zero ends indeed with a feeling of impasse:

However hard he [the writer] tries to create a free language, it comes back to him fabricated, for luxury is never innocent: and it is this stale language, closed by the immense pressure of all the men who do not speak it, which he must continue. Writing therefore is a blind alley (impasse), and it is because society itself is a blind alley (impasse). (2012: 87; 2002b, I: 223)

My argument is that Camus’s untenable ‘style of absence’ and the deadlock that the ‘writing of degree zero’ encountered as early as in 1947 anticipates already what Barthes calls, in 1978, the ‘impossible’ of the Neutral. In the Collège de France lectures, the figure of aporia appears numerous times, and it refers to the paradoxical nature of the Neutral: ‘Thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard’ (2005: 44: 2002a: 75); and: ‘Either I speak of the Neutral and I make it into a law; or I don’t construct a law from it, but then I don’t speak of it (and the whole course falls part)’ (2005: 68; 2002a: 102). This aporia, Barthes claims, is real – even the fact of keeping the course going for 13 sessions is not self-evident (2005: 13; 2002a: 39). He also specifies that, because of this ‘impossibility’ and because of his ‘non-desire for being a guru’, the real subject of his course is not the Neutral but the ‘insistent figure of the desire for the Neutral’ (2005: 32; 2002a: 61).

Jacques Derrida, in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, speaks of a similar aporia, which he calls the ‘ghost of the undecidable’ (1992: 24). The undecidable is not merely the oscillation between two contradictory significations or decisions, it is the experience of ‘that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is obliged – it is of obligation that we must speak to give itself over to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules’ (1992: 24, translation modified). Justice, as law, according to Derrida, is never exercised without a decision that cuts (trancher), but all decisions that cut imply singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, and therefore not the universal. In order to be truly just, one must suspend all interpretations, calculations and rules, and live a moment of silence and of the ‘undecidable’; in order to make laws, one must suspend the ‘undecidable’ and take a position that breaks the undivided silence (The Neutral). Such is the aporia of the foundation of authority, and there is no justice without this experience of the ‘impossible’, without this memory of the necessary suspense, the ‘ghost of the undecidable’ (1992: 20–25). The undecidable, like the Neutral, cannot last. But in its immediate appropriation by language and law, it paradoxically hovers as an ultimate force to nullify the contingency of decisions and positions.

The Neutral: A Step Beyond the ‘Neither-Norism’ (‘Ninism’)

Barthes has insisted throughout his course on the Neutral that the figure is not to be understood as indifference, a blasé attitude that evokes a gray impression of inactivity. Instead, it is a ‘whimsical sourcery’ (sourcellerie fantaisiste) that produces ‘ardent, burning activity’ (2005: 9, 7; 2002a: 34, 32). Contrary to the flat image of doxa, which freezes any spontaneous feelings and congeals them into programmed expressions and desires, the Neutral is a projective space in which intensities ‘bubble up’ (émoustiller) without becoming an imposing proposition or a theory (2005: 197; 2002a: 246). It is a will-to-live, and not a will-to-master (vouloir-saisir). In a more unexpected personal confession, Barthes explains the relation between the soft, ‘twinkling’ Neutral and the hardline, arrogant doxa – ‘The Neutral is purely reactive: it’s a reactive desire’ – and he adds that the reflection on the Neutral, for him, was a ‘manner’, a ‘free manner’ to be ‘looking for [his] own style of being present to the struggles of [his] time’ (2005: 68, 8; 2002a: 101, 33).

We can consider the desire for ‘degree zero’ a reactive desire, in the sense that Sartre’s master lecture on social universality and on committed literature both awakened Barthes’ historical consciousness and puzzled him deeply. How to become a ‘modern’ person, situated in his time, while the only book Barthes wanted to write at the time was on the ‘old satyr’, Jules Michelet?¹⁶ The constant solicitations from journals and newspapers to place art and literature on the ideological wheel only confirmed the fact that intellectuals of the immediate postwar era had no choice but to take sides.¹⁷ Barthes dreamed of a noise-cancelling literature, an empty space that would silence all the political and ideological battles, all the exclamations and judgments, and he called that space the writing of degree zero.

But if this is the case, if the neutral writing already bore characteristics of a non-(ideological) choice, how do we explain the fact that Barthes wrote a depreciative and mocking piece on ‘neither-nor’ criticism in 1956? In one of the Mythologies entitled ‘Neither-Nor Criticism’, he discredits certain articles in the opening issues of the popular magazine L’Express (which had just been launched) for using a ‘superb piece of balanced rhetoric’ (1972: 81; 2002b, I: 783). The author of these pieces claims that the literary criticism L’Express intends to practice would be ‘neither a parlour game, nor a municipal service’, meaning it would be ‘neither reactionary nor communist, neither gratuitous nor political’ (1972: 81; 2002b, I: 783). Instead, ‘culture’ and quality of writing (‘style’ in particular) would be the main criteria, because cultural values, according to this critic, transcend ideologies.

So in 1956 Barthes dismissed neither-norism and in 1978 he champions the Neutral, while the two obviously share common features. Is this a contradiction? Confronted with this question by an attendee of his lecture course, Barthes dedicates a special section of his 25 March lecture on The Neutral to elucidating the issue. The Neutral shares all the appearance of being a form of neither-norism, Barthes explains, and yet it is ‘absolutely different from it’ (2005: 80; 2002a: 115). The difference is that the ‘neither-norish’ criticism plays a safe game. Behind its convenient dismissal of both conservatism and communism, there exists a ‘remainder’: an arrogant stance showing its own attitude is superior to others. While neither-nor criticism avoids one (political) choice, it imposes a different one, i.e. culture over ideology, without realizing words such as ‘culture’ are themselves automatic expressions and hence part of the doxa. Comparing the rhetoric of neither-norism (now extended to daily newspapers such as Le Monde) to the Sadian schoolmaster who uses his ruler to punish both sides while drawing double pleasure, Barthes calls this type of criticism a ‘myth’: behind the appearance of impartiality lies the stern gaze of a judge. The Neutral, on the other hand, defers judgment. It is ‘not “social” but lyrical, existential: it is good for nothing, and certainly not for advocating a position, an identity’ (2005: 80; 2002a: 115). The Neutral defines itself above all by its uselessness and unmarketability (2005: 13; 2002a: 39). It points almost inevitably to the private and the invisible.

Barthes’ attack on ‘neither-nor’ criticism is a perfect example of the ‘reactive’ desire. Calling the perpetual weighing pros and cons petit-bourgeois, Barthes was nevertheless caught himself in their rhetoric of accusation and judgment. If in 1978 he further defines the Neutral not only as a ‘nonchoice’ but also as a ‘lateral choice’ (choix-à-côté) (2005: 8; 2002a: 32), or ‘selected deafness’, it is because he realizes how difficult it is to go truly beyond binary paradigms. When a common opinion (doxa) is laid down, one can develop a paradox (aporia) to destabilize it, but that paradox itself risks becoming solidified and judgmental; one therefore has to ‘seek further for a new paradox’ (Barthes, 1977: 71; 2002b, IV: 649–50):

[H]ow to recognize the world as a tissue of aporias, how to live until death by going (painfully, pleasurably) through the aporias, without undoing them by a logical, dogmatic blow of force? Which is to say: how to live aporias as creation, which is to say, by the practice of a text-discourse that doesn’t break the aporia but floats it as a speech that tangles itself in the other (the public) lovingly (to borrow again a word from Nietzsche)? I said it (inaugural lecture) in another way: literature or writing (in which I locate myself, without any presumption of value) = the representation of the world as aporetic, woven of aporia + the practice that induces a catharsis of the aporia, without undoing it, which is to say, without arrogance. (2005: 69; 2002a: 102)

Following the aporias step by step, such is the strategy of the course on the Neutral. Next to the reactive, an active force begins to be forged. The Neutral cannot be transmitted entirely through words. Instead, it is the ‘shimmer (moire)’: ‘that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject’s gaze’ (2005: 51; 2002a: 83).

Conclusion

I have traced the complexities of Barthes’ first approaches to the Neutral to show that his reflections on (political) ‘commitment’, from the very beginning, step aside from the common understanding of the word, for ‘commitment’ in Barthes avoids ideological stance and militant action, and accentuates the ethical distance to various ‘myths’ fabricated by dominant ideologies. Deeply rooted in the question of language, Barthes’ social theory emphasizes the vigilance of prevalent discourses and the resistance to their imposition on individual desires.¹⁸ The ‘commitment to degree zero’ (my term), or, what Barthes has called at the time the ‘engagement of form’, is itself a paradox, revealing both an ‘assent’ (assentiment)¹⁹ to the Sartrean and Marxist influence while reacting against it. Barthes wanted to move beyond the Sartrean dialectics of content and form, of phenomenon and essence. In Writing Degree Zero, the description of writing as a third term already carried the destabilizing force of the Neutral that will emerge more compellingly in the Collège de France lectures. In this sense, Barthes’ faith in writing and in literature remains intact: only writing and literature can play with and ‘displace’ the assertive power of language and represent the ‘impossible’ (which he also calls the ‘real’) (1979: 6, 8; 2002b, V: 433, 435). What has changed is perhaps literature’s desire to join History. At the time of Writing Degree Zero, Barthes’ utopia involved a social integration of the figure of the ‘innocent’ writer, and it failed ‘tragically’; in The Neutral, that utopic desire has turned ‘domestic’, ‘Fourierist’, pointing to the plurality of individual differences, to a fragmented society ‘whose division will no longer be social, and, consequently, no longer conflictive’ (1977: 77; 2002b, IV: 655).

Barthes’ Neutral shares with the deconstructionist undecidability what Irving Goh has called the ‘pre-positional’ senses, that is, a flickering, intermittent, auto-sufficient state which the ‘pre-metaphysical-subject’ enjoys by refusing to assume a position or embody a principle (2014: 5–6). The ‘pre-positional’ is political because in its refusal to become visible, identifiable and localizable, it welcomes the radical difference and destabilizes totalizing politics. Unlike Derrida, however, Barthes never treated explicitly political questions such as justice, right or law; he did not prescribe the Neutral to any political agenda or progressive goal. Instead, the Neutral subscribes itself to the thought of the ‘Sovereign Good’, securing at its center the space of Literature, writing and living.

The late Barthes rejects all forms of ‘massification’; he has taken a distance from historical narrations and the noises arising from the ‘ideospheres’: history of wars, of politics, of battles, of dominations. Qualifying these narrations as ultimately ‘Western’, he would have loved to have become a Buddhist, a Taoist, a skeptic, or at least a mystic. His ultimate ethical project is very modest: to live according to the nuances taught by literature (2005: 11; 2002a: 37), to be attentive to the world without being arrogant. This ‘a priori decision’, in Barthes, favors an affective generosity, expressive ‘not of universal moral principle but of refinement, selectivity, and differentiation’ (Hill, 2010: 151). One may say that in this Romantic and yet minimalist conception of life, there is always a danger of ‘nostalgic retreat into aestheticism’ (Hill, 2010: 153). For Barthes, however, this ‘risk was worth taking’ (Hill, 2010: 153), for art and literature, marginalized more than ever in today’s society, require defense and protection. They should not be appropriated into any other ‘content’, because their own existence, like the degree zero, has become fragile. The modest dream of ‘engagement of Form’ is nothing but a dream of artistic expressions free from ideologies, meta-discourses, self-righteous positions or calculated judgments. The question is: is this modest dream accepted by the current doxa? Will it fail again, ‘tragically’? Barthes has not committed anything to us, but perhaps everything.

Footnotes

Notes

Yue Zhuo is Professor of Literary Theory and French Thought at Shanghai University. She is the author of the forthcoming La force du négatif, Georges Bataille et la question du sacré (Brill/Rodopi, 2020). She has published more than 30 articles on authors such as Bataille, Barthes, Girard, Derrida, Quignard and (Gérard) Macé in various edited volumes and in journals such as Critique, Littérature, Yale French Studies, French Forum, Modern Language Notes, and Contemporary French & Francophone Studies.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Neutral Life/Late Barthes’, edited by Sunil Manghani.

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